The police officer sons of two south Texas law enforcement chiefs who made fighting corruption the cornerstones of their careers have been taken into custody on suspicion of waylaying drug caches coming across the border from Mexico.

Federal agents investigating several border departments west and south of McAllen arrested Jonathan Treviño, the son of Lupe Treviño, sheriff of Hidalgo County, and Alexis Espinoza, the son of Rodolfo Espinoza, Hidalgo’s police chief, the McAllen Monitor is reporting.

Across the country, state and local governments are facing huge unfunded liabilities for their employee pension plans. And then there’s Social Security.

But three neighboring Texas counties, which opted out of Social Security 30 years ago by creating personal retirement accounts, have avoided a fiscal train wreck while providing retirees with even more retirement income.

Galveston, Matagorda and Brazoria County employees, many of them union members, have seen their retirement savings grow every year, even during the Great Recession. If state and local governments—and Congress—are really looking for a path to long-term sustainable entitlement reform, they might start with what is referred to as the “Alternate Plan.”

Most proposals for creating a defined-contribution alternative to a state pension plan or Social Security use an IRA or 401(k) model…Click here to read more.

A bipartisan delegation of CA legislators and business leaders, are going on a junket to Texas to try to understand why Texas is growing jobs while CA continues to lose them. Really? They need to go there to understand the difference? Here are two great visual aids included in the press release from the CA Republican Caucus Office today:

California Suggests Suicide; Texas Asks: Can I Lend You a Knife? by Joel Kotkin 11/15/2010

In the future, historians may likely mark the 2010 midterm elections as the end of the California era and the beginning of the Texas one. In one stunning stroke, amid a national conservative tide, California voters essentially ratified a political and regulatory regime that has left much of the state unemployed and many others looking for the exits.

California has drifted far away from the place that John Gunther described in 1946 as “the most spectacular and most diversified American state … so ripe, golden.” Click here to read the article

By Joel FoxEditor of Fox & Hounds and President of the Small Business Action CommitteeFri, October 29th, 2010After looking at the state unemployment numbers that came out last week, the Wall Street Journal declared in an editorial that Texas cities have become the destination for investment and entrepreneurship. The paper flatly states: “Texas is the New California.”

Has the Golden State dropped so low that we have lost our reputation as the home of innovation and bright beginnings? Have entrepreneurs found a more comfortable, happier place to call home? It sure looks that way.

The Journal noted California’s huge job loss and Texas’s job gain. But more than that, the paper implied that Texas is the new destination for the entrepreneur. Texas has become the target for “high tech, venture capital, aeronautics, health care and even industrial manufacturing.” Click here to read more.

State policymakers are beginning to understand — or at least face the realities of — a fundamental reason for California’s job loss and now a 3-year $81 billion budget deficit. Basically we pass laws and move on to new ones and call it success. Texas on the other hand — a state that congregates its legislature in only odd years and requires a 2/3rds majority on every bill — created 70% of the new jobs in the United States in 2008 and has a $2 billion budget surplus this year. Click here to go to Fox & Hounds Daily to read more.

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The status quo of education in the U.S. is destructive to our Nation, and to ignore this truth is to be numb, unconscious or in denial of reality.

"If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves. We have even squandered the gains in student achievement made in the wake of the Sputnik challenge. Moreover, we have dismantled essential support systems which helped make those gains possible. We have, in effect, been committing an act of unthinking, unilateral educational disarmament."--A Nation At Risk - April 1983

Drug War Clock for Current Year

Police arrested an estimated 858,408 persons for cannabis violations in 2009. Of those charged with cannabis violations, approximately 89 percent were charged with possession only.
Source: Uniform Crime Reports, Federal Bureau of Investigation Your tax dollars at work--but for whom?

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The Gadfly

Dedicated to considerations of justice and the pursuit of goodness… "to sting people and whip them into a fury, all in the service of truth." --Plato on Socrates